The Apple (AAPL) juggernaut rolled full steam into the new calendar year, as the company Wednesday announced another quarter of breathtaking sales and profit, overcoming concerns about the impact of Japan’s natural catastrophes on the suppliers assembling the Macs, iPhones and iPads that the world can’t seem to get enough of.

While Apple struggled to meet surging demand for its second-generation iPad, iPhone sales jumped 113 percent from a year ago, thanks in part to the company’s decision to start selling the phones through Verizon as well as AT&T. As a result, Apple’s second-quarter profit climbed nearly 100 percent.

“With quarterly revenue growth of 83 percent and profit growth of 95 percent, we’re firing on all cylinders,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a news release. “We will continue to innovate on all fronts throughout the remainder of the year.”

Investors seemed encouraged by the result. After opening at $343 a share, then rising nearly 2 percent along with the broader market, Apple shares in after-hours trading climbed as high as 4 percent to $356.

“Analysts were blown away” by Apple’s stellar performance, “but they weren’t surprised,” said tech consultant Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies. “You look at all the numbers and it’s very clear that demand for Apple products, and the profit they generate, is higher than ever.”

Bajarin said Apple’s inability this past quarter to keep pace with iPad demand, while not a great cause for concern, will probably continue well into the calendar year. He said iPad buyers had waited for the newer version, which was not released until early March, and “that’s why Apple’s in a bind right now and can’t create as many as they need to meet demand. And while Apple said it was hoping to balance supply and demand this next quarter, our research shows they’ll still face a two- to three-week waiting period well into the middle of the year.”

For the period ending March 26, Apple earned record second-quarter net profit of $6 billion, or $6.40 a share. That compares with a net quarterly profit a year earlier of $3.1 billion, or $3.33 a share. Sales were $24.7 billion, compared with $13.5 billion a year ago, and gross margin was 41.4 percent compared with 41.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 59 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

The outcome compared favorably with Wall Street’s projections. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to earn $5.35 a share on sales of $23.3 billion.

Apple sold 3.8 million Macs in the quarter, a 28 percent increase from the year-ago quarter. The company sold 18.7 million iPhones, a 113 percent increase from a year ago, and 9 million iPods, a 17 percent decline from the year-ago quarter. The company also sold 4.7 million iPads in the quarter.

The iPhone’s continued popularity with smartphone buyers apparently got a nice boost from Apple’s agreement with Verizon to begin selling the phone this past quarter. Although the company would not give specifics about how many iPhones were sold by Verizon versus through AT&T, Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook did tell analysts that “with the iPhone we did very well everywhere, and adding Verizon was key.”

Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, insisted that the iPad issues were due to supply, not demand. “We sold every iPad 2 we were able to make this quarter,” he said.

Oppenheimer also said the iPad is generating strong interest from business customers. About 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies have deployed or are testing the tablet for their employees, he said.

Jobs, who is on medical leave, was not on the conference call but his name came up when an analyst asked how involved he was in corporate decision-making. “We do see him on a regular basis,” Cook replied, “and as we’ve said, he continues to be involved in major strategic decisions and he wants to be back full time as soon as he can.”

Some analysts had raised concerns over the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan and how supply-chain interruptions may hamper Apple’s ability to meet the huge demand for products such as the iPad 2.

Before the earnings release, analysts and the blogosphere had been abuzz about things that might have gone wrong in the quarter — namely, supply-chain effects of the tsunami in Japan and iPad 2 sales. (The concern over iPad 2 figures arose from language in a legal complaint that Apple filed against Samsung on Monday.)

Cook, who is responsible for Apple’s day-to-day management in﻿ Jobs’ absence, said on the conference call that the company “does not anticipate any material supply or cost” issues next quarter as a result of the Japan crisis. But, he noted, “the situation is still uncertain and therefore unpredictable.”

As far as future performance is concerned, Apple seemed in its earnings release to be typically underpromising. “Looking ahead to the third fiscal quarter of 2011,” Oppenheimer said, “we expect revenue of about $23 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share of about $5.03.”

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689. Follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc.

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald. In 1993, Pat shared with his colleagues a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the Herald staff's coverage of Hurricane Andrew and its aftermath.

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